فصل 09

Chapter Nine

IN ST PETERSBURG WE WORK, BUT AT LIVADIA WE LIVE

In the summer of 1910, in the face of the continuing dramatic decline in the tsaritsa’s health, Dr Botkin persuaded her to go for a rest cure at Bad Nauheim in Hesse, combining it with a visit to Ernie and other European relatives. ‘It is very important for her to get better, for her own sake and the children’s and mine’, Nicholas told his mother before they left. ‘I am completely run down mentally by worrying over her health.’ His words to Anna Vyrubova were even more candid: ‘“I would do anything,” he said in quiet desperation, “even going to prison, if she could only be well again.”’1

The Romanov family arrived at Schloss Friedberg near Nauheim at the end of August. Most of their 140-strong entourage (inflated by the presence of so many security officers) was farmed out to guest houses in town. Welcome though it was to Ernie and his family, the visit was a logistical nightmare, not to mention an enormous expense. During the four weeks of their stay, which was an entirely private visit, Nicholas for once adopted civvies, and made occasional excursions incognito into town. Nevertheless, the security was as tight as at Cowes in 1909, with marksmen and dogs patrolling the grounds of the castle, and Nicholas’s Cossack Escort supplemented by Okhrana agents under the supervision of Spiridovich shadowing the family’s every move.2

An English visitor, the writer and literary hostess Violet Hunt, recalled the hoo-ha attendant on the Romanovs’ arrival. One evening a notice was posted up in her pension, begging the guests

not to pursue, persecute, or mob the Tzar of Russia, who was staying at Friedberg, three miles off, and who came in every day with the Tzaritza and her children … He went in danger of his life so obvious and so imminent that the craven and businesslike municipality of Friedberg had insisted on his insuring the public monuments of that place at his own expense!

Determined efforts were made by Spiridovich to ‘disseminate fallacious announcements’ of the tsar’s movements, in order to deflect the curious from pursuit of the imperial couple. ‘When [Nicholas] was supposed to be going to the baths it was at the Kursaal [public rooms] you would find him; when it was the riding school it was much more likely to be the lake.’3 Violet Hunt caught sight of him there, ‘a disconsolate figure, encouraging his boy to sail his tiny boat or being rowed about in one’. She often saw Alexandra on her way to the baths, ‘in black with pearls … her face a tragic mask … haughty, dejected. She looked a lovely fool; nay hardly lovely now – the morbid shadow of a queen.’4 At a shop in town full of Venetian glass she again encountered Nicholas with Alexey, intently examining some objets d’art:

I saw his face through the beautiful clear glass; it did not exhibit mere terror, for he was a brave man, but all at once it seemed implicit with a summing up, a résumé of the composite agony of all this race of kings consciously marked down for destruction. His grandfather before him – his uncle – and only the little son with his head below the counter to carry on the monstrous imposthume of Russian Royalty!5

Well might Nicholas have been worried, for during his stay at Friedberg came news of the coup d’état in Portugal on 5 October against the constitutional monarch Manuel II; it was yet another warning, for Manuel’s father, like Nicholas’s grandfather, had been assassinated (in 1908). A lady witnessed Nicholas’s reaction when the newsboy came to the Kurhaus (the spa house) where they were taking tea. ‘The Czar seemed to turn white and apparently was greatly shocked.’ Pulling out a coin to pay the boy he read the news story from end to end: ‘I could read from his face how it had affected him. In his eyes was fright and occasionally they seemed almost desperate. With some effort he shook off his feelings and realized he was the object of curious persons’ gaze. Assuming an air as if nothing had happened he walked to his waiting automobile.’6

At Friedberg the two families were joined by several more relatives: Prince Andrew of Greece, his wife Alice and their two daughters Margarita and Theodora; Alexandra’s sister Victoria of Battenberg and her husband Louis and their children Louise, George and Louis. Alexandra’s two other sisters also briefly joined them: Irene, with her husband Prince Henry and their two boys Sigismund and the haemophiliac Waldemar, and the widowed Grand Duchess Ella – who had recently taken the veil and founded a convent in Moscow – wearing the most stylish of grey nun’s habits and wimple, looking like Elizabeth, the pious heroine of Wagner’s opera Tannh?user.

The four Romanov sisters adored the company of their cousins Louise and Louis, better known to them as Dickie. Although only ten at the time, in later life, and by then Lord Mountbatten, Dickie vividly remembered the girls: ‘Oh, they were lovely, and terribly sweet, far more beautiful than their photographs.’ He was totally smitten with the third sister: ‘I was crackers about Marie, and was determined to marry her. She was absolutely lovely.’* Indeed, to his eyes all four girls were blossoming: ‘They seemed to get more and more beautiful every time we saw them.’7

Cousin Thora had also come over from England with Emily Loch. The morning after their arrival, Olga and Tatiana were eager to go out shopping with Thora in Nauheim, where the jewellers’ shops entranced them, just as had happened in Cowes. They returned the next day and ‘chose heaps to be inspected by the Empress which we took back with us’, recalled Emily, but the crowds that gathered round them had been considerable, and the girls had little opportunity to spend their pocket money, which had been regulated at 15 roubles a month by Alexandra in January of that year.8 At Friedberg and among their cousins, the four sisters seemed happy to play childish games of diablo (a juggling toy) and ‘bumble puppy’ (a game for two with a ball on a string tied to a post). There were plenty of carriage and bicycle rides in the park too, while Alexey had fun playing with Ernie’s two sons Georg Donatus and Louis and was taken out on bike rides by Derevenko, sitting in a specially adapted bicycle seat. They also enjoyed several motor car expeditions with the tsar (who enjoyed driving rather too fast), travelling into the densely wooded countryside for picnics. It was such a rare opportunity for the girls to mix and play with cousins of their own age, with even Nicholas for once letting go. ‘He seemed as happy as a schoolboy in holiday-time.’9 Everyone found the girls polite and solicitous, impressed by how conscientiously ‘they took the greatest pains at table to make conversation for the Gentleman-in Waiting’.10

After more than a month at Bad Nauheim the family moved on to Wolfsgarten for an additional three weeks with Ernie and his second wife, Onor. Alexandra’s health had improved; Dr Georg Grote, who had attended her at Nauheim, had found no sign of organic heart trouble but confirmed that the state of the empress’s health was so serious that ‘had she not occupied such an exalted position, she should have been sent to a sanatorium with two sisters of mercy to take care of her, not letting her see anyone’. She ‘takes too much on herself’, said Grote, ‘and hides her sufferings from everyone’.11 Nevertheless, Alexandra was transformed by being among close family that summer, as Dickie Mountbatten recalled. ‘Even that crazy lunatic my aunt the Empress was absolutely sweet and charming.’ However, many of her relatives were seriously worried about her mental stability. Dickie overheard his father say to his mother at Nauheim: ‘Alicky is absolutely mad – she’s going to cause a revolution. Can’t you do anything?’12

The tsaritsa’s constant ill health was often being put down to hypochondria. But Alexandra was adamant that her ailments were not imagined. ‘If people speak to you about my “nerves”,’ she wrote to Mariya Baryatinskaya, ‘please strongly contradict it. They are as strong as ever, it’s the “overtired heart”.’13 She was aware of how her ill health was affecting the children; ‘having a mama who is always ill does not make life bright for you’, she told Maria that December, but it had its positives: ‘I know it’s dull … but it teaches you all to be loving and gentle.’14 She was now having to deal with one of eleven-year-old Maria’s first adolescent crushes, which she had confided in her. Grigory had clearly once more been acting as agony aunt, and had told Maria not to ‘dwell too much on him’, and not to give anything away in the presence of others. ‘Now that you are a big girl, you must always be more careful and not show those feelings’, Alexandra reiterated. ‘One must not let others see what one feels inside.’15 Such studied reticence had encouraged the view people on the outside now held of Alexandra as aloof and unfeeling. ‘It was the usual policy of hush-hush’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden; Alexandra told her that it was ‘not comme il faut for our family to be known to be ill’ – and that included Alexey. The only time the public were to be told something was wrong was ‘when someone is dying’.16

It was therefore left to the foreign press to speculate. ‘The Czarina Slowly Dying of Terror’ ran one headline, relaying a story from the Rome Tribuna claiming that Alexandra had ‘long been the unhappiest royal personage in Europe’ as a result of the high security isolating her and the family from the outside world, for it had made her ‘a victim of melancholia and morbid fears’.17 It was almost impossible, the papers claimed, to recognize in ‘this sad-faced sombre-eyed woman the merry girl who once delighted the hearts of the cottagers at Balmoral’. ‘Her fear of attack by revolutionaries was now all-consuming.’ There was, said one Australian paper, ‘no more pitiful tragedy in the history of any royal house’.18

By November 1910 and back at Tsarskoe, Nicholas was determined that his daughters should enjoy something of the winter season in the capital. In January he and Olga attended a performance of Boris Godunov starring the famous bass Feodor Chaliapin, a great favourite with the family. In February Olga and Tatiana were his companions at Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin and later Nicholas took all four girls to see the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Such trips were small consolation for the absence of their mother, but all five children thoroughly enjoyed a concert that winter featuring their favourite army balalaika orchestra.

Post Wheeler and his wife Hallie were there, surrounded by members of the diplomatic community and the ubiquitous Okhrana men. The imperial party arrived: Maria Feodorovna, Maria Pavlovna, and ‘trooping after her, not only the two older daughters, Olga and Tatiana, but the younger pair, Marie and Anastasia’ – an event remarkable because it was the first time that the Wheelers had seen all four sisters together. ‘The two older ones were in simple white, each with a string of small pearls, and with their heavy dark hair hanging over their shoulders looked very girlish and sweet.’ Olga carried ‘a little bunch of violets’ and Maria and Anastasia had boxes of ‘silver-wrapped chocolates’. Anastasia sat down in the box immediately next to Hallie ‘and gave me a demure little smile as she set her box of chocolates on the railing between us’.19 Then, as Hallie recalled, ‘there was a stir, the whole audience was rising and facing the back’, as the tsar in marshal’s uniform entered with the tsarevich ‘dressed all in white cloth braided with gold’.20

‘The house was very still, for it was witnessing what Russia had never seen before. People were completely taken aback’, recalled Hallie. The tsarevich was so little seen in public, that for most Russians ‘he had been only a fable’.21 During the balalaika concert that followed Alexey thrilled to the performance, for he loved the instrument and was learning to play it himself. At the end the entire audience rose to its feet roaring its approval, Alexey by his father’s side, sweet and childishly solemn, ‘stealing cautious glances now and then to right and left’. ‘Mon dieu! Comme il est adorable’, Hallie heard a woman near her remark:

There was on every face the adoration that through the centuries had been lavished on the person of the ‘Great White Tsar’, and it was more than that, for this little lad, with his boyish beauty, typified the future to which Russia looked … The Tsar stood for the reign that Russia knew and was now coming to distrust, but in the hands of the little future autocrat were the lambent possibilities of which it dreamed.22

Such adoration of the little heir to the throne served to underline the feelings expressed by Maria Feodorovna back in 1906 that the ‘unfortunate little girls are moved into secondary importance’ with Alexey’s arrival.23 They certainly were in the public’s estimation, for everyone’s eyes were on the tsarevich. Returning to her box after the interval, Hallie noticed that Anastasia and Maria had already taken up their places near her side of the railing. ‘She was not a beautiful child, but there was something frank and winning about her’, she recalled of Anastasia. ‘On the flat railing sat the now depleted box of chocolates and her white gloves were sadly smudged. She shyly held out the box to me, and I took one.’ As the music struck up Anastasia began softly humming the folk tune they were playing. Hallie asked her what it was. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘it is an old song about a little girl who had lost her doll.’ The lingering notes of that lovely song hummed by the young grand duchess, and the sight of her chocolate-soiled gloves that evening, would stay with Hallie for many years.24

In the spring of 1911 Alexandra admitted to her sister-in-law Onor that the ‘cure’ at Nauheim had done her no good: ‘Personally I have felt no benefit … and have been so bad again.’25 Olga was despairing of ever seeing her mother well again. ‘Don’t get downhearted, my darling, if she is not getting as strong as you would like her to be,’ her aunt Ella consoled her, ‘it won’t happen quickly, the real effect of the treatment won’t be felt for a month or two, if not after a second course of it.’ Meanwhile Ella advised that Olga invest her best efforts in patient prayer on her mother’s behalf.26 In the spring at least Olga had the excitement of reviewing the new recruits to her Guards corps, but Tatiana was becoming jealous. ‘I would like so much to go to the review of the second division as I am also the second daughter and Olga was at the first so now it is my turn’, she complained to Alexandra, adding that ‘at the second division I will see whom I must see … you know whom…!!!!??!?!’27 Tatiana too was confiding in her mother about her first teenage crushes. More military reviews followed in August, at the big parade ground at Krasnoe Selo, during which Olga and Tatiana, who were both accomplished horsewomen (having learnt to ride in 1903),28 took great pride in riding out side saddle and in uniform to inspect the regiments of which their father had gifted them the honorary command on their 14th name days: the 3rd Elizavetgrad Hussars for Olga and the 8th Voznesensk Uhlans for Tatiana. Maria would have her own regiment too – the 9th Kazan Dragoons in 1913 – but a glum-faced Anastasia was still not old enough. The Shtandart officers had teased her that in view of her lively personality she should be made commander of the St Petersburg fire brigade.29

During the military reviews that spring the girls had enjoyed a visit from an English cousin, Prince Arthur of Connaught (son of Alexandra’s uncle the Duke of Connaught), a captain in the Royal Scots Greys who had come as an observer. However, the unmarried twenty-seven-year-old prince had, as British ambassador’s daughter Meriel Buchanan noted, other preoccupations: ‘Prince Arthur is coming out next week for the manoeuvres and also (secretly) to look at the Emperor’s daughter.’30 This covert inspection of Olga is no surprise, although we know nothing of her impression of Arthur or his of her.* As the eldest Romanov daughter, she was approaching her sixteenth birthday, a marriageable age, and interest in her in the royal marriage market had long been gathering.* Aware of the need for her two eldest daughters to take their position in society, Alexandra was already planning their official appearance at two family weddings of the children of Grand Duke Konstantin, the first, of his oldest son, Ioannchik, to Princess Helena of Serbia at Peterhof on 21 August.

‘They have all grown a lot,’ Alexandra told Onor as she prepared for this, ‘Tatiana is already taller than Olga, whose dresses almost reach the floor now. – Skirt hemlines drop and hair goes up when they reach the age of 16 – how time flies.’ As for herself, she was likely to be absent: ‘I will barely put in an appearance; will have to see how strong I am, and that won’t be much.’31 In the event, Alexandra was not well enough to attend Ioannchik’s wedding but her five good-looking children made an impression, Alexey ‘charming in the uniform of the Imperial family Riflemen’ and the grand duchesses wearing Russian court dresses, ‘white with pink flowers but no trains and pink kokoshniki’. The groom’s brother thought they ‘looked lovely’.32 No doubt Ioannchik did too, for he had been carrying a torch for Olga since seeing her in 1904 at Alexey’s christening. Even in November of 1909 he had still been holding out hope, for despite his having had a succession of short-lived romantic attachments in his search for a bride, Olga had left ‘an indelible mark on him’. Ioannchik had travelled to the Crimea the previous autumn ‘only out of hunger to see Olga’, but having openly admitted his feelings to the tsar and tsaritsa there, had finally given up hope. ‘They won’t let me marry Olga Nikolaevna’, he had told his father disconsolately.33 But now, at last, the awkward, gangly Ioannchik, who was extremely unprepossessing as suitors go, had found a suitable royal bride, a fact which alarmed the intensely naïve Tatiana, ‘How funny if they might have children, can they be kissing…? What foul, fie! [sic]’34

Just three days later Grand Duke Konstantin’s eldest daughter Tatiana was married to Prince Bagration-Mukhransky in a small family ceremony at Pavlovsk, attended by the imperial family. The weddings were closely followed at the end of the month by an important official visit to Kiev. The girls were increasingly deputizing for their mother during her bouts of illness and this trip marked their first major public role in this regard. They were in the Ukrainian city for the inauguration of a new statue to Alexander II, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his liberation of the serfs in 1861, as well as to visit the famous Pechersky Monastery and attend two large military reviews on 1 and 2 September. Although Alexandra attended the unveiling of the statue and managed a long day of official duties on the 1st, she then retreated, exhausted. That evening Olga and Tatiana accompanied Nicholas to the Kiev Municipal Theatre for a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Here numerous local dignitaries and politicians, including Prime Minister Stolypin, joined them.

During the second interval Stolypin had been standing in the aisle, at the balustrade very near to the imperial box, when a young man rushed towards him with a gun and shot at him twice. ‘Fortunately,’ as Alexandra was relieved to tell Onor in a letter soon afterwards, ‘N., O. and T. were in the foyer when it happened.’35 Sofya Tyutcheva who was there as chaperone remembered Olga suggesting they went outside to get some tea, Nicholas having complained of feeling so hot in their box.36 Out in the foyer they ‘heard two noises, like the sound of an object falling’, Nicholas later wrote to his mother. He thought ‘a pair of binoculars must have fallen on somebody’s head from above’, and ran back into the box to look:

To the right I saw a group of officers and others dragging someone, a few ladies were screaming, and there right opposite me stood Stolypin. He turned slowly to face me, and made the sign of the cross in the air with his left hand.37

Olga and Tatiana had tried to restrain their father but as Nicholas instinctively reached towards Stolypin, he noticed that the prime minister had been hit. Stolypin slowly sank into his seat and everyone rushed to his aid, including Dr Botkin. Stolypin muttered a message for the tsar, which the Minister of the Imperial Court, Count Freedericksz, brought to him: ‘Your Majesty, Petr Arkadevich has asked me to tell you that he is happy to die for you.’ ‘I hope there is no reason to talk of death’, the tsar replied. ‘I fear there is’, replied Freedericksz – for one of the bullets had entered Stolypin’s liver.38

Despite his wounds, Stolypin heroically managed, with assistance, to walk out of the theatre and into an ambulance, which rushed him to ‘a first class private clinic’ where he ‘took Holy Communion’ and ‘spoke very lucidly’.39 Meanwhile, his attacker, Dmitri Bogrov, a young lawyer from a prosperous Jewish family in the city (who had been both a revolutionary activist and an informer for the Okhrana), was set upon by members of the audience who would have lynched him if they could. After Bogrov was bundled off by the police the cast of the opera came onto the stage and joined the audience in singing the National Anthem, Nicholas at the front of his box ‘obviously distressed but showing no fear’.40 ‘I left with the girls at eleven’, he later wrote to Maria Feodorovna. ‘You can imagine with what emotions.’ ‘Tatiana came home very tearful and is still a little shaken,’ Alexandra told Onor the following day, ‘whereas Olga put on a brave face throughout.’41 The following morning Sofya Tyutcheva, who had not slept all night from the shock of what she had seen, was surprised to find the girls calmer than she expected after their experience. Noticing how disconcerted she was by this, their nurse Mariya Vishnyakova came up to her and whispered: ‘He’s already there’, meaning Rasputin, who had happened to be in Kiev at the time. ‘Then it all became clear to me’, Tyutcheva later wrote.42

Hopes remained high that Stolypin would recover from his wounds and the bulletins seemed favourable. ‘They think he is out of danger’, Alexandra told Onor. ‘His liver seems to be only slightly affected. The bullet hit his Vladimir Cross and then bounced off in another direction.’43 Nicholas meanwhile was obliged to continue with his engagements in Kiev and on the 4th attended a major review of troops with the children, followed by visits to museums and to the first school to be founded in Kiev, now celebrating its hundredth anniversary.

The Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelshtam was an eleven-year-old pupil at that time. She remembered the day vividly and how moved she had been by the sight of ‘the very handsome boy and four sad girls’, one of whom, Maria, was the same age as herself. It prompted her to ponder the difficult lives they led:

I suddenly understood that I was much happier than these unfortunate girls; after all, I could run around with the dogs on the street, make friends with the boys, not learn my lessons, make mischief, go to bed late, read all kinds of junk and fight with my brothers and anybody else. I and my governesses had a very simple arrangement: we’d leave that house together, purposefully, and then go our separate ways – they to their rendezvous and I to my boys – I didn’t make friends with girls – you can only really fight with boys. But these poor princesses were bound in everything: they were polite, affectionate, friendly, attentive … they weren’t even allowed to fight … poor girls.44

The tsar twice went to visit Stolypin again, but on both occasions Stolypin’s wife Olga, blaming him for the attack, refused to allow Nicholas to see him.45 On 5 September Stolypin died of sepsis and Olga Stolypina declined to accept the tsar’s condolences. With martial law declared in Kiev and 30,000 troops on alert, fears spread of an anti-Jewish pogrom in retaliation, prompting many of the Jewish residents to flee the city. The imperial family meanwhile boarded their train and headed for the Black Sea coast and the Shtandart, Nicholas ‘giving very strict instructions to the governor General Feodor Trepov’, as he left, ‘that he would not allow a pogrom against the Jews on any pretext whatsoever’.46

Bogrov was tried by military court and hanged ten days later in Kiev, despite a plea for clemency from Stolypin’s widow. Having long anticipated his own violent death Stolypin had asked to be buried near the place of his murder and was interred at the Pechersky Monastery in Kiev. Alexandra might have mourned the manner of Stolypin’s death but she did not mourn his loss, for he had always been implacably opposed to Rasputin. When the imperial party later arrived at Sevastopol en route to Livadia, bands and illuminations greeted them on the seafront. One of the ladies-in-waiting thought this inappropriate – as they all did, so soon after Stolypin’s assassination – and said as much to Alexandra, who snapped: ‘He was only a minister, but this is the Russian emperor.’ Sofya Tyutcheva couldn’t fathom her response: she had seen how distraught Alexandra had been and how she had comforted Stolypin’s widow. What had provoked this sudden change of mood? ‘There was only one thing I could put it down to,’ she later concluded, convinced that the entire family was in absolute thrall to Rasputin. ‘It was that same baleful influence which in the end destroyed the unfortunate Alexandra Feodorovna and all her family.’47

After the horror of Stolypin’s murder the family was very glad to escape to the Crimea, where their newly constructed palace was ready for occupation. The Crimea had always been ‘the loveliest gem in the crown of the czar’, a territorial trophy annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783 at the end of numerous wars with the Ottoman Empire.48 Gleaming white in the brilliant sunshine atop the rugged southern coast, the palace was surrounded by gardens of vibrant-coloured and sweet-smelling bougainvillea and oleander, trailing vines of glycinia, and all around ‘a veritable riot of roses of every colour and shape’.*49 There was plenty of shade too from exotic palms, olive trees, and pines and cypresses, and below the palace, the family had its own private rocky beach and a sea to bathe in as blue as the Aegean. No wonder Livadia was named after the Greek word for a beautiful meadow or lawn. It literally was a heaven on earth for the Romanov children and they spoke of it always as ‘their real home’. As one of the Romanov sisters later put it: ‘In St Petersburg we work; but at Livadia we live.’50 Livadia was also an important refuge for an increasingly world-weary Nicholas and his invalid wife. For those with money and social status the Crimea was the Russian equivalent of the French Riviera, with Yalta, 2 miles (3 km) from the palace, its most fashionable resort, and the Russian social set all arrived here for the balmy autumn months before the onset of the winter season in St Petersburg. Here, more than anywhere else in Russia, they were most likely to catch a glimpse of their elusive imperial family, for in Livadia the Romanovs were far more relaxed and informal than at Tsarskoe Selo.

The Livadia Palace was two-storeyed and Italian Renaissance in style, with large windows that let in the light, and faced in local white Inkerman limestone – prompting its popular name as the ‘White Palace’. It had been completed inside sixteen months, including a second house for the imperial entourage, and had all the modern conveniences of central heating, lifts and telephones. Having taken possession on 20 September Nicholas wrote to his mother: ‘We cannot find the words to express our joy and the pleasure of having such a house, built exactly as we wished … The views in all directions are so beautiful, especially of Yalta and the sea. There is so much light in the rooms and you remember how dark it was in the old house.’51 Inside all was simplicity, much in the style moderne that Alexandra favoured. The private apartments on the second floor had the preferred white furniture and chintz fabrics, and as usual there were flowers everywhere.52 The windows and balconies at the back of the palace gave out over the sea: Olga and Tatiana delighted in taking their morning French lessons with Pierre Gilliard out on the balcony. On the northern side of the palace facing inland, the palace looked out onto the rugged Crimean mountains in the distance. A cool and shady inner courtyard featured Italianate marble colonnades and a fountain surrounded by a pretty knot garden. It was a favourite place for the entourage to escape the heat of the day and sit and chat after luncheon.

An idyllic late summer and autumn at Livadia followed for the Romanov children. There were wonderful days of hiking in the hills with their father, taking drives along the coast to a favourite picnic spot – such as St George’s Monastery perched high on the cliffs at Cape Fiolent – or journeys into the Crimean heartland, past trees heavy with succulent fruit, to the tsar’s own vineyard at Massandra, which produced the finest wines in the Crimea. Day after sunny day was spent riding and playing tennis with Grand Duchess Xenia’s children and other relatives who visited. Swimming was also a great favourite, though after Anastasia nearly drowned one day when an unexpectedly large wave hit them and Nicholas had to rescue her, he had had a swimming pool made of canvas sails attached to wooden posts erected down at the beach for the children’s safety, where they could swim under the watchful eye of Andrey Derevenko.53

With her pathological dislike of studying and of any kind of constraints on her physical freedom, Anastasia was in clover, as she told their tutor PVP, who was staying in Yalta with Pierre Gilliard:

Our rooms here are very large and clean and white and we have real fruit and grapes growing here … I am so happy that we don’t have these horrid lessons. In the evening we all sit together, four of us, the gramophone plays, we listen to it and play together … I don’t miss Tsarskoe Selo at all, because I can’t even tell you how bored I am there.54

Everything about the palace filled the girls with energy and delight. They enjoyed nothing better than going up and running out along the galvanized roof and delighting in the noise their footsteps made. And the nights there were so full of light. Anastasia was entranced by the sky and loved going out on the roof to ‘study the formations of the stars’, for in the Crimea they seemed to shine extra-bright.55

During their stays at Livadia, as at home in Tsarskoe Selo, the family enjoyed regular film shows on Saturdays in the covered riding school. This was such an important event in their lives that the children would spend the following week talking about it.56 Elizaveta Naryshkina was charged with vetting the films, requiring court photographer Alexander Yagelsky (who had also been designated to shoot official footage of the imperial family at all their public appearances) to edit out any parts she objected to.*57 What the children saw for the most part were newsreels or travelogues from Yagelsky’s own Tsarist Chronicles of the family, or films of educational merit. But they also saw dramas such as The Defence of Sevastopol – about the siege of the naval base during the Crimean War – which, at 100 minutes long, was the first major historical feature film to be made in Russia and which was premiered especially for the imperial family at the Livadia Palace on 26 October 1911.58

Nicholas also relished the informality of life at Livadia and the family gatherings they had there, for several of their Romanov relatives had summer homes in the vicinity. Grand Duchess George (Nicholas’s cousin, a daughter of the King of Greece) was nearby at Harax; his sister Xenia and her husband Sandro and their seven children were at Ai-Todor; the Montenegrin sisters Militza and Stana had estates at Dulber and Chair, although they now had little contact with Nicholas and Alexandra. Other influential families spent the spring and autumn in the Crimea: the Vorontsovs at Alupka, the Golitsyns at Novyi Svet and the Yusupovs, who had two beautiful homes: one the Moorish palace of Kokoz inland on the road to Sevastopol, and the other at Koreiz on the coast of the Black Sea.

During the long summer evenings when the Romanovs visited Harax, Grand Duchess George’s lady-in-waiting Agnes de Stoeckl would often find herself looking at the four lovely sisters and wondering ‘what their future might be’. Twenty-three-year-old Prince Christopher of Greece, who had been visiting his sister Grand Duchess George that summer, confessed to Agnes that he ‘greatly admired the Grand Duchess Olga … and he asked me if I thought he had any chance’. They talked it over with his sister and, after giving Christopher ‘a stiff whisky and soda’, Grand Duchess George dispatched him to the Livadia Palace to try his luck. He came back with his tail between his legs; Nicholas had been kind but firm: ‘Olga is too young to think of such a thing as marriage yet’, he had told him.59

That might be so, but Olga and Tatiana were growing up fast, and Sofya Tyutcheva had already noticed with some alarm their coquettish behaviour with some of the officers in the Shtandart.60 Several of these men joined the family at Livadia for games of tennis, which were Nicholas’s principal distraction from his heavy workload. Tennis matches were a golden opportunity for the eldest girls to see much more of their favourites: Nikolay Sablin, Pavel Voronov and Nikolay Rodionov.61 Like Sofya Tyutcheva, General Mosolov noticed the older girls’ growing interest in the opposite sex and how the sometimes childish games they played with officers ‘changed into a series of flirtations all very innocent’. ‘I do not, of course, use the word “flirtation” quite in the ordinary sense of the term’, he pointed out, for ‘the young officers could better be compared with the pages or squires of dames of the Middle Ages’. They were all intensely loyal to the tsar and his daughters and thus were ‘polished to perfection by one of their superiors, who was regarded as the Empress’s squire of dames’. What disturbed Mosolov, however, was the sisters’ astonishing unworldliness: ‘even when the two eldest had grown up into real young women one might hear them talking like little girls of ten or twelve’.62

Nevertheless, the physical transformation in Olga between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays had been considerable. Many remarked how the rather plain and serious grand duchess had now blossomed into an elegant beauty. Her tutor Pierre Gilliard had been taken aback, on returning to Russia from a visit to his family in Switzerland, by how Olga had become so slender and graceful. She was now ‘a tall girl (as tall as me) who blushes violently as she looks at me, seeming as uncomfortable with her new self as she is in her longer skirts’.63

On her sixteenth birthday on 3 November 1911 Olga awoke to gifts from her parents of two necklaces, one of diamonds, one of pearls, and a ring. Alexandra, with typical frugality, had wanted one large pearl to be bought for each of her daughters every time she had a birthday so that by the time they all reached sixteen they would have enough for a necklace; a fact which the head of her private office Prince Obolensky considered a false economy. Alexandra was eventually persuaded, with the tsar’s backing, to buy a five-string necklace that could be broken up into individual pearls, so that the pearls in the necklaces when complete would at least match.64

That evening, Olga appeared wearing a full-length, high-necked, tulle dress with a lace bodice and a deep sash round her waist pinned with roses, her cheeks flushed with excitement and her shining fair hair dressed on top of her head – an important signifier of her transition from girl to young woman. ‘She was as excited over her debut as any other young girl’, recalled Anna Vyrubova. But the girls were still thought of as two pairs: Tatiana was dressed similarly to Olga with her hair up, while Maria and Anastasia wore shorter matching dresses with their hair loose.65

The ball was the social event of the Crimean season, and Olga was thrilled to have her favourite officer Nikolay Sablin as her escort for the evening; while Tatiana was partnered by Nikolay Rodionov.66 At a quarter to seven, 140 carefully selected guests assembled in the large upstairs state dining room for dinner. Agnes de Stoeckl recalled how

Innumerable servants in their gold and scarlet liveries were standing behind each chair – those special ones called ‘l’homme à la plume’ with plumes in their hats. The ladies were in rich coloured gowns, the young girls mostly in white tulle, and the gorgeous uniforms seemed to belong to a feast from the eastern hemisphere.67

After a candlelit dinner, the dancing began to music from the regimental orchestra, as officers of the Shtandart (which was at anchor nearby at Sevastopol) and the Alexandrovsk cavalry division invited the ladies to dance. Nicholas proudly conducted his eldest daughter onto the dance floor for her first waltz, as a gaggle of admiring young officers gathered round to watch. It was a magical evening, with a full moon in a cloudless sky. The exotic Crimean location made it even more special, wrote Anna Vyrubova:

the glass doors to the courtyard thrown open, the music of the unseen orchestra floating in from the rose garden like a breath of its own wondrous fragrance. It was a perfect night, clear and warm, and the gowns and jewels of the women and the brilliant uniforms of the men made a striking spectacle under the blaze of the electric lights.68

Flushed with the thrill of dancing the mazurka, waltz, contre-danse, danse hongroise and cotillion, and heady with the Crimean champagne they had been allowed to drink for the first time, Olga and Tatiana spent the whole evening in high spirits, ‘fluttering round like butterflies’ as General Spiridovich recalled, and savouring every moment.69 Never one to say much in her diaries, which she had first attempted keeping in 1906 at the age of eleven, Olga made little of the occasion:

Today for the first time I put on a long white dress. At 9 p.m. was my first ball. Knyazhevich (Major-General of the Suite) and I opened it. I danced the whole time, right up till 1 a.m. and was very happy. There were many officers and ladies. Everyone was having a terribly good time. I am 16 years old.70

Rather as anticipated, the empress had made her excuses about attending the dinner but had come down afterwards to greet her guests, looking quite beautiful in a gold brocade gown and wearing vivid jewels in her hair and her corsage. By her side was Alexey, ‘his lovely little face flushed with the excitement of the evening’. Alexandra sat down in a large armchair to watch the dancing (looking, as one lady recalled, ‘like an Eastern potentate’). During the cotillion she went down onto the dance floor to place garlands of artificial flowers on the ladies’ heads that she had made herself.71 She tried several times to send Alexey off to bed, where he stubbornly refused to go. Eventually she left the room, upon which Alexey jumped up into her chair. ‘Slowly his little head dropped and he slept’, recalled Agnes de Stoeckl, upon which Nicholas, who had been sitting at a table playing bridge for most of the evening, went over and ‘gently woke him up saying: “You must not sit in mama’s chair” and led him quietly away to bed’.72

Other smaller family dances were enjoyed by the sisters that autumn at Harax and Ai-Todor but General Mosolov later recalled that ‘the children long regarded [Olga’s] ball as one of the greatest events in their lives’.73 For on this one, special night in the Crimea the Romanov sisters had shown that despite the limitations of their till now sheltered lives, ‘they were simple, happy, normal young girls, loving dancing and all the frivolities which make youth bright and memorable’.74 Elizaveta Naryshkina could not help wishing that the girls would now be able to take their proper place in Russian aristocratic society. ‘In this, however, I was to be disappointed.’75 For although, when the family returned to Tsarskoe Selo, Olga and Tatiana were allowed to attend three more balls given by the Romanov grand dukes in the run-up to Christmas, their mother maintained a stern attitude about how ‘harmful’ she thought aristocratic society to be.76

But Olga, of all the girls the most deep-feeling and sensitive, was now struggling with her emotions, full of longing for something more from life. At sixteen she was already well aware of widespread discussion about her future marriage, only too painfully conscious that the men she most admired and felt comfortable with – the officers of the Shtandart and her father’s Cossack Escort – would never, ever, be acceptable candidates.